Séance on a Windy Afternoon
A Chronicle of Corpses (2000)
directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
"When you were young, you didn't like this place, either."
"Of course not."
A lovely tracking shot through one of those old Puritan cemeteries, with a man walking slowly at the border where grass finds the great overgrown woods of old Pennsylvania, stems but does not control the boredom. There is a certain claustrophobia to everyone knowing everyone's secrets and everyone keeping someone else's, but no horror of the late-night something-in-the-woods variety (although there is, in fact, something in the woods). Doleful lines like "God will be lost to us forever" are delivered in flat monotones, and the director's promising low (low) budget use of light and shadows is undone by a theatre director's sense of the dramatic and over-attention to stylistic theory.
The first thing we hear is a story about Samson and Delilah, with a priest, in voiceover, wondering about the differences between desire and faith, between faithlessness and failure. The emotionless - not "tortured" - odyssey that follows occurs at some indefinite time period in Philadelphia when moony young women were permitted to wear undone shifts into a cathedral. Too bad McElhinney isn't a McIlhenny; it's like facing a plate of PA Dutch cuisine without a bottle of Tabasco in sight.
directed by Andrew Repasky McElhinney
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
"When you were young, you didn't like this place, either."
"Of course not."
A lovely tracking shot through one of those old Puritan cemeteries, with a man walking slowly at the border where grass finds the great overgrown woods of old Pennsylvania, stems but does not control the boredom. There is a certain claustrophobia to everyone knowing everyone's secrets and everyone keeping someone else's, but no horror of the late-night something-in-the-woods variety (although there is, in fact, something in the woods). Doleful lines like "God will be lost to us forever" are delivered in flat monotones, and the director's promising low (low) budget use of light and shadows is undone by a theatre director's sense of the dramatic and over-attention to stylistic theory.
The first thing we hear is a story about Samson and Delilah, with a priest, in voiceover, wondering about the differences between desire and faith, between faithlessness and failure. The emotionless - not "tortured" - odyssey that follows occurs at some indefinite time period in Philadelphia when moony young women were permitted to wear undone shifts into a cathedral. Too bad McElhinney isn't a McIlhenny; it's like facing a plate of PA Dutch cuisine without a bottle of Tabasco in sight.
posted by NPK at 8:35 AM
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